Daniel Crooks Static No 7

Daniel Crooks began his ongoing Time Slice project in 1999, exploring alternative models of spatio-temporal representation through the moving image. One of the main threads of this investigation is the formal treatment of time as a spatial dimension, as a tangible and malleable material.

Time Slice is a series of videos and digital prints. Thin slices are extracted from a moving image stream and then recombined using temporal and spatial displacement. This technique is applied to both still and moving images and, while conceptually similar, the visual outcomes are quite distinct: photographs that progress through time and videos of frozen moments that move.

Both trigger a perceptual shift in our viewing of the space/time continuum, graphically revealing the underlying rhythms and patterns of the physical world and tracing the rhythms of our navigation through it. Though inherently digital, the images have the most beautifully organic qualities: images that are at once aesthetically and intellectually intriguing.

By using machines to work outside of real time Crooks aims to expose new modes of perception, breaking down the traditional correlation between time and space to imagine new ways of seeing. Precision motion control combined with sophisticated digital processing provides the freedom to explore alternative spatio-temporal representations, isolating and exaggerating the interwoven physical variables that construct perspective and motion. Further blurring the line between discrete and continuous, the monocular nodal perspective of the conventional camera is also disassembled and reconfigured across time to form extended polycular images.

The relationship between the width of the slice, the angle of view and the temporal resolution of the video determines the 'plane of cohesion' that distance from the camera where objects join seamlessly acrossslices to create an undistorted image (a kind of spatio-temporal depth of field). Also, due to the extremely narrow angle of view of each slice, the reconstructed image becomes almost two-dimensional, and without perspective takes on the qualities of a flattened isometric or 'polyocular' projection.